Friday, May 10, 2013

WAXWINGS by DANIEL NATHAN TERRY

EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Waxwings by Daniel Nathan Terry

(Lethe Press, Maple Shade, N.J., 2012)

While appreciating the many moving poems in Daniel Nathan Terry’s Waxwings, I also admire the structure of this poetry collection. When poets create a poetry book, many tinker for a while on which poems to include and in which order they shall appear.I don’t know how Terry came to organize this book, but on this particular issue,Waxwings has one of the most effective structures I’ve observed for form-ing a poetry collection.

Waxwings’ organizational coherence takes the title poem, “Waxwings” as the root for the poems that follow its position as the third poem in the book.Here’s an excerpt:

…the boy counts thirty-seven waxwings

necklacing the telephone wire. They are too distant

to see the glistening red drops for which the birds are named,

but he knows they’re there, at the tip of those folded wings

like seals on old correspondence between lovers. The cool air trills

and wheezes with strange talk. As he shifts

his backpack, one bird swoops from the wire

to the round holly pincushioned with scarlet berries

not five feet away. The boy freezes. The bird plucks one only,

then returns to the wire. Gingerly,

the berry uncrushed, the gatherer passes it to its neighbor,

who passes it in turn, and so on down the wire.

In the long minutes before the bus arrives,

the same bird gathers berries, passes them down

until each bird is satisfied. Finally, the first bird fed

feds the provider.

At that moment, the boy in the poem “fantasizes / that kids in his class break into song // and dance like fools in an old musical.”When a camera records their joyous performance, the kids would be seen as

…all of them holding hands—

Jack the football star, Shannon the beauty queen,

Ronny the bully, Todd the unattainable, the distance,

the secret, the wrong—joined together in a star of arms and legs

that kaleidoscopes in the blackness. Everyone smiles

as they mouth the words to a love song.

The poem ends with the boy’s wish “to reach out,/ break the red seal, open the envelopes of their wings, / read their characters on the white sky // until he understands, until they become a story / he can share.”

The poems in Waxwings can be seen as stories shared by the poet as he tries to understand his life’s experiences.Many of the poems are not just stories but “love song”s.The poems span a life—from boyhood to adulthood.Each poem is underscored by this attempt to understand something until there is a story the poet can share.It’s surely no coincidence that in the poem “Waxwings,” the sky is described as white in the line “read their characters on the white sky.”White sky—white page?The page upon which poems are presented to a reader.

It’s also a wise move that this title poem was not the opening or first poem in the book.While it could have played its same role (root) as a first, versus third, poem, a layer of complexity arises from this poem being introduced after the first two: “Scarecrow” and “Self-Portrait (Gay Son of a Preacher).”

“Scarecrow” is (partly) about a fragile pretender of a man, while “Self-Portrait (Gay Son of a Preacher)” is about what its title says it’s about.Both are so necessary that they enhance by introducing the root (third poem) of the collection.Here are some lines from “Scarecrow”

“crows mistake you for a man:”

“How long before the snow and I

take you down?”

and here’s an excerpt of “Self-Portrait (Gay Son of a Preacher)”

The sermon is halfway over,

but the boy hears enough—Naaman,

once a great warrior, became a Leper,

ghost white, his flesh a torn garment

of wounds. And he remained that way—

until he obeyed God’s prophet, washed

seven times in the river Jordan and his flesh

was made clean and new as a child’s.

The boy’s fear slips away—he releases

His mother. He rises, joins the altar call.

His father’s arms open

Before him, wafer and wine in his hands,

The congregation sings “Just as I Am.”

But the boy, silent, mouth open,

Hears only his Savior—a voice

In his chest –saying Come,

and I will make you whole.

It’s significant that in the above excerpt, the poem’s ending, the congregation sings “Just as I am” but the boy narrator is focused on his “Savior… saying, Come / and I will make you whole.” That is, the boy seems to understand that there is a process of living and maturity he needs to undergo before he can be a real “man” or “whole.” But that’s not all—how must the boy grow to understand that what/who he is, with his “secret” that is “wrong” (“Scarecrow”) is nonetheless not a “leper”?The answer lies in the unfolding of these poems for the rest of the book.

Relatedly, while I understand from the poem that waxwings are birds, what comes to my mind in reading that title is the myth of the boy Icarus who flew towards the sun on wings made from wax.And that the boy plummeted to his death because his wings are not real.Of course the poet must have been aware of this Greek myth, and its story’s layer also adds to the poetic urgency of what roots this collection: this desire to understand and the importance of understanding.

The importance of understanding. To try to dispel illusion (whether that’s possible is a different story). The importance of understanding because, moving beyond my admiration of the collection’s structure to the poems themselves, the poems address issues of import. Generally (and simplistically), they offer stories on the instability of identity.Here’s an excerpt that attests to a hard-won understanding—from the poem “Snow Falls in Hartsville”:

5.

We never dreamed we’d end up on our knees

together on her narrow bed when we were sixteen

and her parents were wherever her parents went

when they should have been beside her. And mine

were where I should have been—at home,

but I ran away to be with her, to prove

I was a man inside of her, my girl. And she was

so willing and soft, but it hurt her too much

in ways I wouldn’t understand until

a year later, when I lay on my back

in my male lover’s trailer in the longleaf pines

and took him inside me and remembered

how young I was when the farmer’s son

had done to me what her uncle had done to her.

6.

But nothing done to me or done to her

made us what we truly are or even most of what

we were. I loved her because she was the first

man who loved me too.The first man, at least inside

her bones, who accepted the boy who couldn’t be

a proper man, who couldn’t be what he wanted

to be. And she played the Gibson guitar for me

and sang about what would eventually be

today—her short, strong fingers on the fret,

her soft breasts gone, removed by the hip

of the wood, music coming from two bellies

into mine. Only in some ways part of a gift

from the uncle who abused her. Where would we be

now if we’d confessed? But that was years ago.

7.

Twenty-five years ago, and counting still, she confessed

in a letter, not from my girl—but from the man

that she’s become, the man she was always meant to be.

And it wasn’t just the surgeries, it was years

of swinging hard and sometimes connecting

with the pitch—from his uncle, from his girlfriends,

and once or twice, from me. Now, I’d like to believe

I’m the man I was always meant to be—leaning in

to my lover, to my life, to the wonder

of having once been a man who loved a woman

who was almost the perfect man for me. But maybe

neither of us is done with becoming what we were

meant to be. No way to know. And still no way

to keep those considered to be children safe.

“Snow Falls in Hartsville” is an important story that urgently needed to be written.But just as Terry’s meditations go deeply, the language goes beyond mere communication—story-telling—to effect a lush resonance. For instance:

Swallow this

house—bedroom window paned

to look like a roadside cross

erected for a reckless boy, wreath

of camera flare, paper flowers of real grief

with too bright a center, edges finally fading

(--from “Photograph, 1984”)

This a testament to the poet’s discerning eye.Terry’s correct—I’ve seen many of these fake flowers and roadside tokens and it is true (even as I’d not focused on it before) that the centers of fake flowers are usually “too bright” and perhaps inappropriately so when the matter at hand is grief.

Let me leave you with yet one poem whose comprehension and language surely will entice you to exploring this book further:

A Rumor of Fire

Ragged August—a wounded month

slinks under the house, panting in the crawlspace.

Dogwoods burn red two months early.

Birds roost in midday, feverish and thin

as thorns. Lawns sing to thatch brittle

as old doll hair—a rumor of fire

could reduce the neighborhood to ash. I draw the blinds

against the struggle. The air conditioner labors

in darkness. The house is small—

two bedrooms, one bath, a narrow living

room—all we could afford. Six years ago we signed off

in the cool of spring—the front yard masted

with pines, billowed by one live oak,

foam white camellias cresting the blue door. The walls

seemed conceptual, as if longing could sail

us beyond them into the garden. Now I lie

on the sofa, the low ceiling trapping my breath

like a mask, and realize I have never lived

in a house I have loved. I want to wake up

in a soft bed, in a room so vast the walls are imagined,

windows flung wide as the horizon, rain falling

in the green world. And you, my love,

I want you to emerge like a seedling

from the furrowed sheets, dazzled and new,

watching for the rising storm within me.

Waxwings—a generous gift from the poet Daniel Nathan Terry.

And also worth noting is the cover painting, “Icarus 1” by Benjamin Billingsley.It’s a painting that testifies to how there’s really no difference between abstraction and figuration in painting (as several artists have said).I didn’t immediately see the male torso, nipple and wing in the painting that first struck me as a lush abstract (so to speak) work.But that the painting can be both abstract and figurative concurrently or one sighting at a time “fits” the stories and/or theme of Waxwings.

I am also heartened by Billingsley’s color diction—that, despite darkness in the background, there is light in the foreground and on the fields that form the male torso.For just as the narrator in Waxwings becomes a man through the light of increasing revelation—and just as Icarus’ ecstasy was kissed dangerously, but kissed!, by the sun—the colors in Billingsley’s painting form a man who is suffused with light, who is sunlit.